For those MSDN Universal (update: ALL) subscribers who aren’t at Tech·Ed 2004 in San Diego, you can now download the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview May 2004 from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. The 32-bit edition weighs in at 2.53GB, while the 64-bit edition (yes, that’s right…the 64-bit edition) is a hefty 3.32GB of pure goodness. Both are provided as DVD ISO images. If you don’t have a DVD burner, you can use a tool like Undisker to open and extract the files directly.

Could you please specify for which versions of MSDN subscription this download is valid. The previous preview bits were for MSDN Universal only, not for MSDN Professional; is that still true?

It is kind of irritating for people like me, who are in an organization that has a MSDN Pro subscription, to poke the people who have the keys to the download area, only to find out the download is not for us.

Could you please specify for which versions of MSDN subscription this download is valid. The previous preview bits were for MSDN Universal only, not for MSDN Professional; is that still true?

It is kind of irritating for people like me, who are in an organization that has a MSDN Pro subscription, to poke the people who have the keys to the download area, only to find out the download is not for us.

Sorry, Luc. Unfortunately, I wasn’t made aware of the MSDN subscriber level when I received my notification. I apologize for any confusion, and I’ve updated my post to include a mention of the Universal subscription. Thanks for the heads-up.

The error is probably due to a replication issue on our end – It looks like the file was slow to replicate to a few download servers and so it appears in the site for download, but the download link doesn’t work for the particular server you’re connected to. This should be resolved very soon if not already. Also, we’re making the CTP builds available to all subscribers (even OS level).